ANN DEMEULEMEESTER
The Belgian designer brings her signature style, which champions craftsmanship and an element of the unexpected, into the home via her collaboration with Serax.
The Belgian designer brings her signature style, which champions craftsmanship and an element of the unexpected, into the home via her collaboration with Serax
Ann Demeulemeester made her name in the fashion world with bold, asymmetric tailored silhouettes that constantly traversed the themes of light and dark, romantic and rock chick. Now, the Belgian designer is playing the same game with a new collection of tableware and lighting for Belgian brand Serax.
This new venture owes everything to a sea change five years ago, when Demeulemeester decided to step down from the eponymous fashion label she had launched in 1985 with her photographer husband Patrick Robyn. “It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I was attracted to everything opposite to what I had at that moment,” she says. “I was hoping to create a new life. In the country, it felt so open, so undefined. Suddenly, there were a lot of different possibilities.”
The couple moved from their Le Corbusier house in Antwerp — the last of its kind in Belgium — to renovate a 19th-century country house in Kessel, a half-hour drive from the city. The previous owner quite literally asked her to buy it: “She said, ‘This house was built by a woman, the master of the house has always been a woman and I’m looking for a new woman to take over from me’,” Demeulemeester recalls. “And as I do believe certain things come your way because they’re meant to, I said yes.” The work required on the house fitted perfectly with the couple’s ingenuity, resulting in the tables, lamps, curtains and chairs they have always made for their homes. “It’s how I started with fashion, sculpting with fabric and then with clay to make my own shoe lasts,” says the designer. The move to the countryside also afforded Demeulemeester new creative challenges. “I wanted to learn something new, to have a new material to work with,” she says of wanting to master the old techniques of making porcelain and mixing glazes. “I had ideas and drawings but no idea how to make them.” This led to her taking lessons with expert teachers in England, France and Germany before setting up her own kiln at home. Those early porcelain pieces now form the backbone of the Serax collection, launched in Paris last September, and include the first piece Demeulemeester ever made ››
‹‹ — a coffee cup that’s matt black on the outside and glossy white on the inside. The success of the cup led the designer to make similar pieces, now forming the Ra series of cups, bowls, plates, jug and cake stand.
Another of Demeulemeester’s initial designs, a series of plates on which colour slowly progresses inwards across the plate, has evolved into the Dé collection. “I wanted to use the plate like a canvas, painting in shadows in order to create light in the middle,” she says of the feathery chiaroscuro effect (in black or fiery red) that starts subtly at the edges on some plates and almost fills the entirety with colour on others. For these, each one is handpainted by artisans in China and executed precisely to Demeulemeester’s own techniques, guided by videos of her painting in her studio.
In the Dé collection, a bowl-shaped cup sports an unconventional horizontal handle — another of Demeulemeester’s first experiments in porcelain. “I wanted it to sit round and low to the table,” she says. Encouraged by Serax’s co-founder Axel Van Den Bossche, she has also designed six styles of glasses for the debut collection — some delicately stemmed, others heavy and sculptural, made from either mouth-blown, lead-free crystal or pressed glass. There are also knives, forks and a variety of spoons, each one featuring handles with differing asymmetrical facets, a subtle ode to the way Demeulemeester would once have designed the line of a jacket or the hem of a skirt.
The needle-like prongs that support her range of lights replicate the slightly sharp, dangerous edge to her knives. The lights feature hand-dyed fringing or translucent porcelain ribbons modelled on lights Demeulemeester and Robyn have made for their own home. “For me, beauty is not about prettiness,” says Demeulemeester. “It can be about something stronger. I like contrast and intrigue — when it’s not immediately evident what something is.”
Demeulemeester has designed everything to be mixed and matched. “I don’t want everyone to have all the same thing,” she says. “The smile on my grandchild’s face when I put the red plate in front of him while everyone else has a black one is fantastic.”
Each piece resonates with the sense of Demeulemeester’s own individual touch. “There is more than enough stuff in the world, so if I make something, there must be a reason for it,” she says. “I want to be sure I can give something more.” serax.com
“For me, beauty is not about prettiness. I like contrast and intrigue — when it’s not immediately evident what something is”